Brendan Goodrich

A US Department of Transportation UTC Outstanding Student of the Year, 2017

Brendan received his B.A. in Psychology from Cornell University in 2015. As an undergraduate, Brendan's studies centered around mental health in undocumented immigrant communities, a topic which he explored at Johns Hopkins Hospital's Community Psychiatry Program and as a crisis counselor at Cornell.

Brendan first became interested in transportation planning while working at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration's Statler Hotel. There, Brendan utilized his skills as a commercially-licensed transit bus driver to overhaul the teaching hotel's valet and shuttle service. After this project, Brendan explored the discipline of planning by joining a Design Connect group of urban planning students at Cornell and has been hooked ever since.

Following his graduation, Brendan worked as a Research Assistant for conservation economists in the indigenous Maya village of Ek'Balam, Quintana Roo, Mexico, and later worked at a traffic engineering firm with projects around Washington, D.C. to learn the basics of the discipline.

As a second-year master's student in Community and Regional Planning, Brendan is interested in the intersection of transportation and human factors. He performs transit-oriented development (TOD) and megaregional commute pattern research as a Graduate Research Assistant under Dr. Ming Zhang. During the summer of 2017, Brendan accompanied Dr. Zhang and other UT students to Xinhuazhen, China, where they worked with Chinese officials to develop a transit-oriented development plan for a high-speed rail station area, which is a unique application of TOD concepts.

In addition to the aforementioned research, Brendan also works as a Graduate Research Assistant for Administration of Dr. Zhang's USDOT-funded Cooperative Mobility for Competitive Megaregions Tier-1 UTC.

In his free time, Brendan is an advocate in the child welfare system, and also works with a local restaurant chain to identify and correct customer experience shortcomings.